Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Nightmare in Badham County is a disturbing and surprisingly well-made TV movie, first
broadcast on ABC in 1976. Equal parts thriller, social commentary and
exploitation flick, Badham County had
more going for it than sleaze and T & A. It. featured compelling lead
actresses, a stable of well-loved TV stars moonlighting as sleazy villains and
a gritty, unsettling ambiance.

UCLA coeds Diane Emery (Lynne
Moody) and Kathy Phillips (Deborah Raffin) are driving cross country when their
car breaks down in the Deep
South. A kindly old African-American man stops to help them, but
before they can drive off with a repaired tire, racist Sheriff Danen (Chuck
Connors) drives past. The fact that Diane is black
and Kathy is white doesn’t sit well with Danen. That’s when the
nightmare begins.The corrupt sheriff
has the girls take in their car for some unnecessary repairs, and through help
from a sleazy gas station attendant and a corrupt judge; the girls are
sentenced to 30 days hard labor at a hellish prison camp.

Diane and Kathy are separated in the camp, which divides
barracks by race.Kathy befriends a young
girl Emmeline ( Kim Wilson ) who later
meets a bad end at the hands of sleazy
Superintendent Dancer (Robert Reed).
Like the villainous sheriff, Dancer gets
away with his evil deeds due to political connections. Both Reed and Connors
went on to play similarly despicable characters in the mini-series Roots.

The producers
tacked on nude scenes and more explicit violence to release the film overseas. BadhamCounty became such a cult hit in China
that Raffin visited the country and became an unofficial Goodwill Ambassador
for Hollywood. She helped arrange for
Chinese films to be shown in America
and vice versa.

The tension throughout BadhamCounty never abates. The girls
attempt to escape or reach someone on the outside several times, but everyone
in town is in cahoots with (or afraid of) the town’s crooked lawmen and
polticos.

Diane makes one particularly daring attempt to escape with
nail-biting results for the viewer. Jo
Heims’ script is full of twists and turns befitting a more “respectable”
subject. Director John Llewellyn Moxey lends
the same foreboding air to BadhamCounty as
he did to his more famous films Horror
Hotel and Night Stalker.

In the politically incorrect 1970s , TV movies didn’t resolve all storylines in a neat little bow, and
even some sympathetic lead characters suffered grim fates. Nightmare in Badham County was no exception.There’s a glimmer of hope at the end, but not
without tragedy.

While not the
sleaziest of the women in chains genre, it does have its moments. A catfight
out in the fields ends up with a water hose turned on the prisoners and a few of the girls are ogled as they serve drinks to the rich townsfolk at an outdoor party. Tina Louise, as nasty prison guard Greer, is the antithesis
of GilliganIsland’s glamorous Ginger.She
shows no mercy to any of the girls, stripping down a prisoner and beating her during
a bed check. The other female guards Dulcie (Fionnula Flanagan) and Smitty (Lana Wood), are just as vicious. Smitty coerces
a frail inmate into sex in. exchange for food in one scene. This isn’t allmodern day, airbrushed pseudo-lesbian erotica
– it’s really grim, more frightening than titillating.

Raffin was nominated for an Emmy for her work.I thought Moody gave the better performance - much more subtle and realistic. Raffin overacted quite a bit,
especially near the end of the film.

A watchable combination of story and sleaze, Nightmare in Badham County is one of
many lost made for TV gems from the 1970s. You can buy Nightmare as part of the 8-Movie Pack Man-Cave at Amazon.